Karl Kroeber

Bio: Karl Kroeber is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Ethnopoetics. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1 citations.

American Ethnopoetics: A New Critical Dimension

Abstract: Ethnopoetics is the study of preliterate societies' modes of discourse, the formal complexity ofwhich requires that they be understood as literature. In the twenty years of its existence ethnopoetics has demonstrated that material collected by linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists inattentive to aesthetic components or functions reveals—when carefully analyzed—patterns of superb literary artistry. Because the central focus of this discipline is work oral in its original form, ethnopoetic critics do not ignore the uniqueness of individual performances. But these critics assume that the artistry of any single performance is made possible by the existence of definable literary traditions. The art of a single work, as with Western European literature, simultaneously embodies and modifies an aesthetic system. Ethnopoetics thus radically opposes modern celebrants of \"primitive\" art, artists such as Picasso and critics such as Roger Fry, who have praised aboriginal creations as accordant with Modernist aesthetics while implicitly or explicitly denying the capability of \"primitives\" to create significant artistic traditions. As in linguistics, which operates on the assumption that no language can be identified as \"primitive,\" the fundamental presupposition of ethnopoetics is that there is no such thing as \"primitive art.\" The importance of ethnopoetic ambitions to recover artistic system is perhaps best illustrated by Western European civilization's supreme ethnopoetic texts, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The most famous work of classical scholarship in this century is Milman Parry's study of Homeric formulae, which first appeared more than half a century ago. Parry's

A Theory of Semiotics

Abstract: Foreword Note on graphic conventions 0. Introduction-Toward a Logic of Culture 0.1. Design for a semiotic theory 0.2. 'Semiotics': field or discipline? 0.3. Communication and/or signification 0.4. Political boundaries: the field 0.5. Natural boundaries: two definitions of semiotics 0.6. Natural boundaries: inference and signification 0.7. Natural boundaries the lower threshold 0.8. Natural boundaries: the upper threshold 0.9. Epistemological boundaries 1. Signification and Communication 1.1. An elementary communicational model 1.2. Systems and codes 1.3. The s-code as structure 1.4. Information, communication, signification 2. Theory of Codes 2.1. The sign-function 2.2. Expression and content 2.3. Denotation and connotation 2.4. Message and text 2.5 Content and referent 2.6. Meaning as cultural unit 2.7. The interpretant 2.8. The semantic system 2.9. The semantic markers and the sememe 2.10. The KF model 2.11. A revised semantic model 2.12. The model \"Q\" 2.13. The format of the semantic space 2.14. Overcoding and undercoding 2.15. The interplay of codes and the message as an open form 3. Theory of Sign Production 3.1. A general survey 3.2. Semiotic and factual statements 3.3. Mentioning 3.4 The prolem of a typology of signs 3.5. Critique of iconism 3.6. A typology of modes of production 3.7. The aesthetic text as invention 3.8. The rhetorical labor 3.9. Ideological code switching 4. The Subject of Semiotics References Index of authors Index of subjects